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My perspective may be a little skewed since my kids closets were already done when we moved into the house, so I didn’t have to pay all at once to do them… But I adore their walk in closets with built-in’s. We have a mixture of high and low bars, some spaces for lawn things to hang when they get older, wiremesh drawers, and closed drawers. I’m considering buying more closed drawers for things like underwear and socks that would fall through the wire drawers; right now I have plastic sterilite drawers to hold those things. Currently my daughters don’t even have dressers in the rooms, which is such a huge space saver. I am out now but will post some pictures when I get home.

We got Elfa installed in all of our closets - love it! They do an Elfa sale twice a year, so we waited for one of those before taking the plunge.

My son's room is modestly sized and he has about 7 feet of closet space in it with only a single rod at adult height and a shelf above that. It is open from floor to ceiling and it is currently "closed" with curtain panels in front of it, hung from the ceiling.

I hemmed and hawed about doing a closet system, but ultimately I decided against it because right now he doesn't have any clothes that he has to hang. He has youth scaled furniture composed of a 3 drawer and a 3 drawer with a side door piece that contain his clothes. Then in the closet, is a hanging cubby organizer where I put his school uniforms, folded, one for each day. The rest of the closet hanging space is actually my overflow, so for now, we're not doing a closet system because the furniture and the hanging cubby is sufficient for the kind of clothes he has. We will revisit if we ever get to the point where he's wearing dress shirts and slacks...which is what I think hanging storage is best to keep the clothes as wrinkle free as possible. I hang most of my own clothes, I fold very little, but I think that's the result of dress pants and dresses versus polo shirts and joggers!

We also have a playroom that has the big lego table and bulky toys, so I didn't really need to free up floor space. I think that also impacted my decision.

@Mrs D: There are a billion Ikea hacks on the Kura so yeah I'm sure you can paint it. I think you just need to sand it to buff out the clear coat, or perhaps you can just paint a primer right over it.

We like the Kura a lot. We've rearranged it a few times now through the big boy bed transition. He went from a floor bed in a Privacy Pop tent, so we needed to give him a cave-like bed. We did the bunk on top configuration with a standard mattress on top and then the thinnest mattress Ikea sells on the bottom and then put the house tent over the frame. DS1 slept on the bottom in his little house cave but climbed to the top to play on the top bunk.

Recently, we started having some bedtime behavior issues, so to switch things up, we flipped the bed upside down so that the bunk is on the bottom (so the platform bed configuration). We threw the house tent over the top like a canopy, so now the bed feels bigger and more spacious than it did when he slept under the bunk, but still enclosed. (My kid just sleeps better in an enclosed space, he's weird).

Long story short, we love it!

we used rubbermaid configurations for our girls rooms because we completely rebuilt their closets when we bought our house and couldn't spend $1000+ on stuff from TCS (two large reach in closets). i've been pretty happy with them and since our needs have been changing as our family grows, i'm glad i didn't splurge on TCS at that time.

http://www.rubbermaid.com/en-US/shop-products/configurations%C2%AE-customizable-closet (we bought the titanium set from amazon and it was so inexpensive and very easy to set up!)

we then built out a simple closet for DH and i using the elfa system and we're happy with that too! but our needs were basic and won't change.

all that being said, both options have really utilized the space and kept us from having to buy more little do dads and book shelves to store more and it looks good (when it's organized!)

@Mrs D: hi! Just curious if you went with the TCS closet and how it worked out. Also, did you do the IKEA bed?

@Mrs D: that's so funny! Would love to see pictures I'm getting ready to do closets and a pantry with them this fall. Good to know I can plan it out with them in advance like that. Did you do it in store?

@Mrs D: So exciting! Since my comment to you above, I did do a ton of re-organization w/ container store stuff and I love them more and more. I follow their hashtag on IG to see all the organizational glory from them!